I have a show opening this weekend. It is called Softer, Softest, it is at an artist-run space called Delicious Spectacle. I have been fantasizing about this show for a few years- a show of soft sculpture and work that deals, in general, somehow, with the condition of softness. The name comes from a Hole song from the album Live Through This, “I've got a blister from, touchin everything I see.” I have always been really into Hole.

I've always had a thing for soft sculpture. So does my dad. He used to collect pop art exhibition posters, especially Claes Oldenburg. We had them all around the house. I remember seeing Oldenburg's soft ice cream cones at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Incidentally, that is the first museum to show my own work, in a Vitrine on the first floor with the other six-year olds. Later, I heard that Oldenburg's wife actually sewed all those sculptures and a bit of the magic dulled for me.

For a while, I watched Tumblr like TV. I scrolled and scrolled and clicked through different blogs like one surfed channels once upon a time. I kept scrolling through these teenager's blogs, or perhaps they were just teenager enthusiasts, and they kept hash-tagging “soft” especially “soft grunge.” These images are sad funny weird, appropriative, nostalgic, self-consciously emotional, poetic uses of google searches, digital collages, film and cartoon stills, blatant shallow consumerism, tropical fruit, cute occult imagery. Stuff that references 90's grunge but is aesthetically paler. But mostly these images are shit that I feel like I am on the tail end of getting, these constant reminders that I'm getting old. This summer, I turn 26. Isn't it an utter testament to my not coolness that I am fascinated by and trying to talk about this? So. In my imagination this whisper, “soft grunge blog, follows back similar,” became conflated with this soft sculpture show I wanted to do, with this Softer, Softest, kind of tribute to Courtney Love. And so now- finally putting this show together, I'm like totally not looking at tumblr as much as I used to. I'm like, oh wow- I'm really over that idea. Isn't that always the case? Once the time of the show is finally here you're on to new and other things. Just like tumblr, trends cycle in and out at a million reposts a minute. But its ok. But now I think, fuck me, I am trying to combine too many things I like into one mega vague show. This show is about soft sculpture, about the internet, being a teenager, nostalgia, about softness, about being willing to change, to yield, to feel nice to touch, to be delicate, gentle, not hard. While I'm worried, fuck, I am trying to do too many things with this show and there are too many artists in this show, I also have to tell myself- it is this way because there are too many things to say and too many artists to show and thats why this show is about the internet even though it would be simpler if it were just sculptures made of soft things. So it is a conglomerate. Isn't the white cube gallery the manifestation of everything which isn't soft? Harsh light, concrete floors, painfully white walls. I think, fuck, I need to paint all the walls at Delicious Spectacle, I don't want the harsh and cold whiteness. But TBH, I don't have any money for this show, and so I am just doing what I can. I don't need to go crazy. I don't need to go over the top. I love that Delicious Spectacle is DIY, it is just a space that these artists had, that they turned into exhibition space. It doesn't matter that I don't have money for this show, I can do it anyway. And, I can do it because all these rad artists agreed to do it and each contribute a part to make the exhibition whole. It perplexes and disappoints me all the time that more artists in DC don't just open up their homes and do art shows. Anyway. One of the walls will be painted, however. Rania Hassan and I went to the space last night to paint one of the walls, her wall, a soft purplish grey. On that wall, she is going to hang many small works, images of trees on which little teeny knit dresses hang in bas relief. Meg Blafas is the first person I invited to be in this show, I have been wanting to work with her for years and I am pumped to finally get to. Her work for the show, “Mother Goddess Among the Flora,” is a sculptural assemblage, combining elements of her collage work and her “Plushies.” I have a Plushy, named Kittysnail. It is a fluffy pink cat stuffed animal with a tiny snail head, it is as weird and cuddly as it sounds. A lot of people have been confused about the idea of me doing an exhibition. They ask, “will there be performances?” I'm like, duh. Throughout the opening Ziad Nagy is going to perform his piece. And, the following weekend we are going to have a whole night of performances, with Anya Liftig (see last week's post on PERI0D!) and Matthew Ryan Rossetti coming down from New York, and Hoesy Corona coming from Baltimore. I would like to go on about all the other pieces that are going to be in the show, but I don't want to spoil it either. Tonight I went to a restorative yoga class. I know, whatever. I spent the day at my retail job trying to breathe and not just panic about the amount of work I have to do in the next few days for various projects and the tremendous amount of pressure I feel for putting this show together on my own. But not on my own, each of the artists has been great and helpful and supportive. But for some fucking reason I have decided to do a whole bunch of extra shit to make my life more difficult but hopefully make the show just a teeny bit more rad. I make it hard to breathe sometimes. The yoga instructor said, “Feel your body open to softness.” and I did, I melted and was like, “oh yeah.” This is a show that it is soft, it doesn't have to be anything strictly preconceived or defined, it can just be anything. Sometimes I think we get a little constricted by ways we have seen exhibitions done before and we forget that we can do whatever the fuck we want.